Can companies force their employees to work overtime?

Can a salaried employee lose her job for refusing to work overtime?

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will consider that question next month when it hears arguments in the case of a woman who alleges she was fired after refusing to work 60 or more hours a week.

Joanna Upton was a product manager at a Dedham, Mass., company three years ago when a supervisor announced that all managerial staff would be required to work until 9 or 10 each night because of an upcoming merger. Upton, who was a single mother with a young son, says she asked to take work home but was turned down. The situation worsened after Upton took a day off because her son was ill, and missed an important meeting. She was fired two weeks later. Upton sued the company, claiming her single-parent status led to her firing and, in effect, to workplace discrimination. The company said Upton was an employee-at-will so she could be fired for any reason as long as it was not discriminatory. After a lower court ruled against her, Upton appealed. Boston lawyer Harvey Schwartz, who represents Upton, says that even though his client was an employee-at-will, her employer's actions violated the state's public policy of protecting children and families."People are being forced to choose between their children or families and their jobs," he said. Upton and her lawyer are not the only people who feel that way. Other workers are grumbling, too. Some are challenging the long-held belief that the 50- to 60-hour work week is not only desirable, but the only way to succeed in corporate America. "Workaholism is the one addiction that our society rewards with salary increases, respect and promotion to management status," said Martha Izzi, former regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. Perhaps one of the most prominent supporters of shorter work hours is Harvard University economist Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Schor put Americans' obsession with work on the national agenda. She pointed out that productivity has more than doubled in the United States since 1948, so many of us could work fewer hours, still maintain a decent standard of living and put food on the table. Instead, says Schor, consumer spending has pushed the vast majority of Americans into a demanding work-spend cycle that has resulted in the steady erosion of leisure time and bitterness about trying to achieve the American Dream. Schor's argument sounds good: Get off the treadmill, slash the current 40-hour work week to, say, 30 hours, or work four ten-hour days and give employees a longer weekend. Still, millions of working people, even those with college degrees, are finding it harder to hold onto what they already have. With the steep decline in manufacturing jobs, others are relying on low-paying service and temporary jobs. Supporters of a shorter work-week say there is a solution. "We can solve the problem of underwork by redistributing work and shifting to a four-hour workday, or we can suffer unemployment for the majority of Americans," said Jonathan King, an MIT professor of molecular biology who chaired a conference on technology's impact on work at MIT. The real solution -- and challenge -- will be to get the architects of public policy to pay attention. And that probably won't happen fast enough to help working women like Joanna Upton, who, according to her lawyer, has spent the last few years trying to support herself and her son on an income significantly lower than the one she had.

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